The Existentialist: An Epilogue
by Camudekyu
Summary: Continuation of The Alchemologist: Winry wasn't used to people without blockades. It was unnerving, and she had never been quick enough on her feet to prepare herself for him.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N:** Thoughts and comments are very much appreciated. Thanks, y'all.

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**The Existentialist**

_An Epilogue_

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"Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end."

-Seneca the Younger

**I.**

_It's so easy to place blame. In fact, that's usually my first reaction for every confrontation I have. First I blame myself. Then I blame one of the other people implicated. Then I might blame someone else who's not there but is indirectly involved. Then probably myself again. And then, by that time, I've gotten into another confrontation, and I don't have time to worry about blaming someone for the confrontation before. I've got new confrontations to think about. Always new confrontations. _

_I imagine some kind of justice is out there, dealing blows to all those people who earned it, all those people whom I have blamed. Yeah, because I'm the judge. I'm sure it's as comforting to everyone else as it is to me that I've been endowed with this power. _

_I try not to, but I still believe in equivalent exchange. What you give is what you get. The world is just. It's fair, and I'm the only one who is allowed to moan when I don't get back what I put in. _

_But, honestly, who am I to determine fairness? Maybe what you put in—the energy or the love or the time—can't be measured by someone like me. _

_Still, I believed, ultimately, all's fair in everyone's life but mine. People get what's coming to them. _

_That's why seeing him again, like that… the first person I blamed was myself. _

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She had met Jean Havoc for the first time when she was eleven or twelve, in a bar, with Edward and a bunch of people she didn't know. He was so charming, even then, to little, barely pubescent her. Had she not been born in love with Edward, she might have attached herself to him in that way that prepubescent girls do to older men.

Nearly ten years and one failed shot at Edward later, Jean Havoc arrived again, the same way he did before: bored and smoking.

Winry had moved to Central a few months before and established herself as an independent contractor. But establishment meant that she had filled out the paperwork and had started paying more taxes with the money she wasn't making yet.

She had resisted selling the house for as long as she could. It had been in the family for a long time, and it had as many ghosts as it did termites. She started getting offers, though, as soon as she put it on the market, and she got all those dollar signs stuck in her mind, and she couldn't wait to put them in her stomach. The whole thing happened so quickly. She didn't even get to say goodbye.

One check for two months' overdue rent and a stocked fridge later, and she still missed the place.

The full stomach made her brave, though, and she got snagged into her first job within the month. The Central Orthopedic Group: the only physical therapy, prosthetic, and automail provider contracted with the military.

The last troops from the Ishbal Reformation were trickling home, making a pretty constant stream of men in blue uniforms in her office. That combined with the summer—a mechanic's busiest time of year—had the waiting room clogged with bodies on the morning she remet Jean Havoc. The men—mostly men, a few women—covered every surface, filled every couch cushion, and parked wheelchairs in every corner.

It felt like a hospital in there. From where she sat just about in the middle of this creaking, coughing, groaning pack of soldiers, she wondered what kind of diseases Ishbal had. Really bad ones, she was sure. Ones she wouldn't have an immunity against.

Winry was acting secretary that morning. The problem with automail mechanics in general is that they require precision. Every millimeter counts when you're rebuilding someone's leg. For that reason, the COG couldn't keep a secretary for more than four months. So, they took shifts. Winry didn't have any clients until three, and she would be trading out with an intern named Cathy at lunch.

Winry checked her watch. Cathy was late.

Jean Havoc stood in the doorway, nearly tall enough to brush the top of the doorframe with his rather unkempt, blonde hair. He had one foot on the carpet and one foot on the porch. He seemed content just to straddle the threshold and smoke lazily.

She had seen some odd behaviors in patients, far odder than this, in fact, but something about Jean struck Winry. He didn't pay any attention to his comrades, almost pointedly. The way he shifted his weight from porch to waiting room and back led her to believe that, first, he wasn't a patient, and second, he did not want to be there. Unless he was very far in his recovery or had a rather clandestine injury, he was the only soldier there who could fidget without wincing.

Winry watched him over the partition between the front desk and the waiting room. He looked exactly how she remembered him. Still impossibly tall—which, when she was a kid, she thought of just about anyone taller than her—and broad. Winry realized that, for most of her life, Edward had typified male-ness in her mind, and that would make just about anyone seem tall and broad.

Jean stood straighter and steadier than anyone else in that waiting room. Perhaps that's what struck Winry most. He looked like a buoy of constant-ness in that blue sea of troubled, unstable men.

Winry saw him finish his cigarette, flick away the butt, and look over at her. Why it suddenly made her feel shy, she couldn't say. After making eye contact with him, she looked down and fiddled with the files sitting on the desk.

When she looked back up, he was approaching the desk, and Winry felt her pulse quicken, like she had a bird trapped in her chest.

"Well, fancy meeting you here," he said in that way that men do, resting one elbow against the counter like men do when they say things like that. He smiled a crooked grin. Winry could smell smoke and aftershave, and she felt a warm wave of remembrance. He smelled like Rush Valley.

"Fancy that," she replied, like she'd seen women in moving pictures do. It sounded contrived in her ears. The effect she was going for was charming. Winry was aware that she was blushing, and she could just bet that Jean was aware of it, too. Not that she was unfamiliar with men and their elbows and the way they liked to lean in and grin. Like he was doing. Apparently, soldiers have a thing for secretaries, because, any time she ran the desk, she would get a succession of blue-suited men leaning over and saying charming things and flashing charming smiles.

Typically, Winry smiled back and asked them what time their appointment was.

On this particular day, though, she blushed like a fourteen-year-old and had a difficult time dredging up a reply that didn't sound contrived.

"When I noticed you from back there, all I could see was your eyes over this desk," he said. "You looked like a pigeon perched there."

There was a sweetness to that. She smiled. "I try not to make a habit of sitting back here. I'd rather be in the shop."

He turned toward the desk and propped both elbows on the counter. "It's been a while, eh, Kiddo?" he said.

In her mind, Winry stood up and twirled herself around. _I know_ she would say. _Look how I've filled out since I was twelve! _But she didn't say that. "It has, hasn't it?" she said, instead. "Eight years, maybe?" she offered.

He put on a pained face. "You make me feel old."

Winry smiled at him. He didn't look old. He looked, honestly, like the fittest man in the room.

Winry had seen more than her share of predatory faces looking over that desk at her. Men who had met her when she was Edward's smaller, female shadow. Men who would say things like _It's been a while, Kiddo_ and then look her over. Those bozos were easy to deflect. But there was an honest interest in Jean's face, a friendliness that she had forgotten men could have.

She watched him a moment, watched those disarming eyes, so blue she might expect to lean in an hear the ding of buoys, the cry of gulls.

He could have been a photograph from her past, something she had stumbled upon while cleaning out the crawlspace at the old house. And that was comforting somehow. It was easy to forget that there were excerpts from her years with Edward that didn't make her feel like she was drinking alone.

Winry thought about the year prior, an exercise in her emancipation from the last familiar male face. And She thought that maybe it was time to try again.

So when Jean asked her what time she got off for lunch, she told him.

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Jean did things like rearrange himself so that, when they were strolling side-by-side down the sidewalk, he was between traffic and her. He did things like hold her elbow when they crossed the street. Winry remembered Jean having a sort of teasing nonchalance to him almost a decade prior—perhaps it was because she had been twelve and he twenty. But that was gone now. He seemed entirely not self-conscious in his actions, in the way he chatted with her.

The longer they walked, the more suspicious of him she got. She felt him brush his palm across her lower back when they maneuvered through a pack of school children. And men just don't do things like that. They calculate and practice, and she started to wonder if Jean had been trained by some magnanimous woman in his past, someone who taught him to hoard his touches with mock-chivalric accuracy.

When they sat down in two wrought iron chairs at a sidewalk table outside a deli about two blocks from her office, Winry was in entire doubt of him. Jean Havoc was trying to play her like a violin with its strings too tight, and he was probably chuckling away to himself at how easy it was to make her sing.

Winry crossed her arms over her chest and watched him. She was prepared to make him dance that stupid man dance that they do when the only thing they really want in the world is for you to touch their boners. She watched him unbutton his uniform coat and drape it over the back of the chair. He loosed the top button of his shirt and rolled up his sleeves.

"So how'd you land a job like the COG?" he asked after they had ordered two coffees.

Winry knew the COG had a reputation around the military. The name COG was synonymous with being out of commission. She had heard a soldier say something like _I'll be off the COG for sure this time_ when he was expecting a lecture from a superior. That reputation aside, it was the best clinic in the city, and Winry knew it. "I just had to drop the name 'Fullmetal' here and there. In the right circles, his automail is as famous as he is."

_Was_ she thought to herself; Edward had been out of the limelight for years.

Jean slumped back in his chair and draped his left arm over the back. "So, they just took you on, like that?"

"I wish," she muttered. "I've got to apprentice for a year under a COG mechanic."

"So, I take it you work like a mechanic, and they pay you like an apprentice," Jean offered.

Winry laughed. "Pretty much. My boss stays out of my way." She caught herself then. She was being charmed.

Jean waved down a waitress, and they ordered their lunches. Someone had once told her that a girl should order salad when eating with a man, and despite Winry's mistrust in him, she was just self-conscious enough to take the advice.

And that was a dumb idea because after she cleaned out her salad, she was still really hungry. Winry didn't mean to eye the other half of Jean's BLT. She didn't even realize she was doing it until Jean realized it.

"I bet you do a lot of heavy lifting at your job. A lot of manual labor sort of stuff?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Nothing extreme, but someone's got to unload the parts from the truck."

"In that case," Jean said, putting his half a sandwich on the edge of her salad bowl, "You're going to need more than rabbit food."

If she could have gotten away with slipping under the table and crawling away without his noticing, she would have. Winry felt her face heating up. She felt like an idiot. "I can't eat your lunch," she said, shaking her head.

"I sit at a desk most of the day, Pidg. You need it more than I do."

Boy, was she ever being charmed. Pidg? _Pidg?_ But the worst part about believing so hard that he couldn't be for real, that he was just wheedling her, was realizing that it felt so nice. And just because she felt in her gut that it was all a facade, did that mean she couldn't enjoy it?

He had a really nice smile, and he was turning it on her. Right on her. And he was calling her _Pidg_, and she loved it already.

"Thanks, Jean," she yielded, and while one part of her felt like she was conceding territory, another part of her was too hungry to care. It was a really good sandwich, too.

"So what brought you into the COG?" Winry asked around a mouthful.

"What? Taking you out to lunch isn't a good enough reason?" He grinned that lopsided grin.

"Aren't you sweet," she intoned, and Jean snorted into his coffee.

He took a moment to clean himself up with a napkin. "My doctor told me I needed to get back into physical therapy, and I thought I'd drop in to schedule an appointment."

Typically, when someone mentions physical therapy, Winry could tell exactly how much they wanted to disclose. Especially men. After seeing it so many times, she could guess with pretty good accuracy whether he was seeing a doctor because he broke a leg rescuing a baby from a runaway train or because he strained his groin during ballet practice. But not Jean. His face didn't beg her not to ask, not did it hope that she would ask him to tell a war story.

So she gambled. "Can I ask what happened?"

He shrugged and looked away for a moment. Like he was deciding how much he wanted to say. He looked back. "You get shot at a lot in my line of work," he said, putting up some distance between them.

It was that right there that made her cave. There was a sort of vulnerability in his voice when he said it, and Winry was so surprised, so caught off guard that she was stunned into silence. To see that glimpse of something he would prefer to keep hidden felt like hearing a secret. There was a sadness to it, a regret. And Winry felt her expectations of him shift and fracture like the crack that ran down the side of her coffee mug.

But men just don't do things like that. Regret and sadness and vulnerability were never pieces on the board she thought Jean had brought to the table. He made her wonder if perhaps she didn't really know what men do. For that reason, later that day, when Winry ran into him loitering on the sidewalk outside the office, she felt completely unprepared.

He rubbed at the back of his head when she came out the front door. "Hey, Winry," he said.

He was standing out in the sun, and the glare off car windshields was so bright that she took him by the arm and pulled him into the shade under the awning. "Hi, Jean," she said, a little surprised. "Have you been waiting out here long?"

He shrugged. "Uh, you know, just waiting for you to get off work. I came by earlier, but you weren't at the front desk."

"Yeah, I had a client," Winry answered.

"Right," he said. "'Cause you work here."

She smiled at him and nodded. "I do."

This was not the dance she had expected. Winry knew he was trying to ask her out again, and this, more than the nickname or the casual touches or the half a sandwich, charmed the socks off her.

"So, look," he began, spreading his hands. "I hope this isn't weird, but I'd like to see you again."

There was that bird in her chest again, tossing itself against her ribs. "I'd like that."

"Do you have plans Sunday evening?"

Winry felt the pressure of something blooming behind her sternum. She had a sneaking suspicion that it might be girlish glee, but she was feeling too fluttery to judge herself for it. "No," she answered, just barely keeping that bird in her throat.

"Do you have a nice dress? Possibly one that matches this?" He pinched the lapels of his uniform coat. He started to look nervous, like with every question, he was narrowing the _yes I'll go out with you_ margin.

"I could get one."

Jean blew out a sigh of relief. "Great. Because every May, the Armstrongs throw an Officer's Gala, and it's going to be crawling with folks you know. So you could catch up with all them. And this will be the first one I'm not going stag to. Potentially, I mean. If you say yes, that is. Which I think you should. Because you would have a good time." At this point, he gave her a look that said both that he had made his point and that he had kept talking long after the speech he had practiced had ended.

There went her socks. _Zing_. They took off down the street, blown off by the anxious hope in his eyes.

"I'd love to," she said.

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Winry was one of a sea of young women at the gala. They all wore their hair in the same style—a cascade of long curls pinned at the crowns of their heads—and they all wore the same dress—black, floor-length, slinky numbers with sweetheart necklines. Despite this, Winry felt out of place. And there was _a sea_ of them. Some of them traveled from one pack of men to another, some of them clung to potential meal tickets, and Winry felt like an idiot because she really was not looking to marry anyone there.

Jean had picked her up from her apartment in his big, black car. He had told her that he would be there at seven, but Winry was too busy standing in front of her mirror and wondering what the hell she was thinking when she had bought that dress to notice him parked outside until he had been there for five minutes or so.

What had she been thinking? The dress was amazing, she supposed. Maybe if she had been wearing it somewhere else with someone else and were, in fact, someone else, it would have been amazing. What it was on her, she wasn't sure, though, and she had spent the first hour after putting it on turning circles in front of her mirror. When she faced forward, it was fine. Clingy, flattering, not too low cut. But when she turned around. God, what had she been thinking?

The back of the dress scooped low. Very low. Winry craned her neck over her shoulder and looked at her own ass for a really long time. The back of the dress pooled in a curve of folds above her tailbone, and while she knew she had flounced around Rush Valley naked-er than that, something about the combination of black and silk and all that exposed skin just seemed too much. What _the hell _was she thinking?

When she came out of the building, carefully stuffing her keys into a tiny, impractical clutch, Jean was leaning against his parallel parked car by the sidewalk, his face bent toward his cupped hand as he lit a cigarette. The sun was still high in the sky, but Winry could see the orange glow of his lighter reflecting off his cheekbones.

"Hi, Jean," she said, getting his attention. In her head, she was going to sound casual and comfortable. It came out, however, in this coquettish little voice, more breath than voice, that completely betrayed how exposed she felt.

He looked up, pinching his cigarette out of his mouth. "Hey," he said. "Ready to go?"

"I guess so," Winry replied. "Sorry to keep you waiting."

As she approached, Jean stood up straight and took a moment to look over her dress. He whistled. "Country mouse," he said, "What happened?"

Winry was glad that he didn't spout something about her looking ravishing or whatever because deflecting or accepting that manner of crap is difficult enough, but she couldn't deny that little bit of satisfaction she felt when he opened the car door for her, saw the back of her dress—or lackthereof—and dropped his cigarette out of his mouth. It sizzled when it hit the dead leaves in the gutter, and Jean quickly put it out with his foot. Winry sank into the passenger seat and pretended not to notice.

For as quietly pleasant as that introduction was, Winry felt like one output from the same cookie cutter once they got to the party.

The Armstrong's ballroom was a manifest absurdity. The hardwood floors, set up in a chevron design with different colored panels, were polished to a high gloss, and the crystal chandeliers looked big enough to hold a troop of acrobats. It was a long hall, with the band on a dais at one end and tables and a bar at the other, lined all the way down with heavy-looking, marble columns.

Winry's distinguishing characteristic, it seemed, among the crowd of hangers-on was that she knew more people there than just her date. Jean treated her, though, like she couldn't be left alone, and while it was a little overwhelming at the time, she would later realize that he was being a good escort. When she noticed Lieutenant Ross a few conversational pods over, Winry darted over to her to say hello, and Jean remained close behind. Major Armstrong, Lieutenant Bloche, Captain Hawkeye. Jean remained at her side, and they all caught up together like they all went way, way back. Winry caught herself, after a few conversations with officers from her past, feeling like they did, like Jean could have been a regular installment in her life.

Something about the way she caught his eye while they chatted with other officers, these casual little side glances, barely enough for the person they were meeting to notice. Winry felt the excitement of new company, but it was tempered with a sort of ease. Like she knew him better than she did.

And that was weird. Winry wasn't used to people without blockades. It was unnerving, and she had never been quick enough on her feet to prepare herself for him.

He introduced her to his comrades whom she did not know. He called her the most up-and-coming automail virtuoso in Central, Miss Winry Rockbell, when he presented her. Like he would know. She thought the gesture sweet nevertheless. Winry noticed early on a particular pattern in his introductions: when Jean presented her to a female colleague, he offered casual gesticulations or rested his hands on his hips, but when he introduced her to a man, he rested one hand on her back, between her naked shoulder blades. His touch was galvanizing, like he was touching live jumper cables to her instead of his big, warm palm. Despite her best efforts, it was hard not let him distract her.

Jean excused himself to get them drinks, and Winry sank into a seat at an empty table. Her feet were not used to the punishments of the socialite lifestyle, but she was too self-conscious to rub her aching arches. She distracted herself, instead, by flying up into her head and far away from the party. It was a self-destructive pass-time, over-thinking things, but it was one she was used to. And boy, was she good at it.

This was not her society. She came from tobacco-chewing, slang-using, blue-collar people who got dirty when they worked with their hands. Winry glanced down at her palms, at the wood grain pattern the ground-in dirt made on her fingertips. And she remembered that feeling of being an interloper, of thinking everyone knew she had no business being there. This was Edward's society. She had friends there, for sure, but she looked like all the rest of the small-town girls who had spent their rent payments on a ridiculous dresses and were trying to snag good husbands while they still had the looks to manage it. The place was crawling with them.

There was something different now, though. This was her second Officer's Ball to attend, and the first one, almost a decade prior, had been a lesson in isolation. But this one? Jean was so welcoming, like she had every right to be there.

But he also had called her Country Mouse. And Winry reminded herself that, despite Jean's best efforts, she really had no business being there.

"You okay?" Jean asked when he came back to the table.

Winry plucked at a thread on the table cloth. "Fine," she said in the least convincingly fine voice she had in her.

"I got you champagne. Hope that's okay." He held up his hands, her champagne in one and his screwdriver in the other.

He set the flute down in front of her, and she downed it.

"Easy there, Pidg," Jean said, laughing. "Most people around here sip that stuff."

"I'm getting another," she announced.

And before Winry knew it, she was, maybe, three champagnes in, the room was over-hot, Jean was the sweetest thing on two feet, and her partial nudity in public was only an afterthought. It felt like there was static in the connections between her head and her body. Winry's feet didn't really seem to want to do what she told them, but walking came from muscle memory, so she just trusted that her legs would remember because her brain was not about to instruct them.

Winry didn't realize it at first, but she was drunk. Good and drunk. And the right solution to her feeling out of place in that ballroom was definitely _not_ getting drunk. At the moment, though, it felt like it could have been.

She must have put on a pretty convincing not-drunk act because Jean asked her to dance. She said yes because, well, he _was_ the sweetest thing on two feet.

He led her out onto the floor, which was loosely crowded with other couples, swaying and chatting. Winry couldn't feel her feet. She felt like she was floating, although, she would later realize, she probably had stumbled her ass all the way there.

The band started something slow and lilting when they came up. Something about summer heat and passion and, probably, love or whatever, but the song alit on her ears in piecemeal. Jean turned her around toward him, and it felt like he had spun her. When she stumbled on her big, drunk feet in their high, precarious heels, Jean swooped his arm around her back. Perhaps to an onlooker, his arm firmly pressing her to the front of his uniform might have looked like fervor. In reality, though, he was keeping her from spilling herself all over the dance floor. Like a big, drunk idiot.

"Careful there, Pidg," he said over the string of moments when Winry couldn't hold her own weight. He set her back on her feet. "I think you've had enough for tonight," he laughed. She felt her head rock back on her neck, like the joint in there was too loose. She watch the smile slip off his face, and the line between his eyebrows deepened as he drew his brows close.

She hated herself for that face. She tried to remember what made her think drinking would make the situation better.

"Do you want to leave?" he asked more generously than she thought she deserved.

He had awfully large hands. He held her right hand, curled his fingers around hers like he was cupping a bird. He pressed his palm to the middle of her bare back, and she felt his fingertips on both her shoulder blades. The sharp contrast of his warm, dry skin and the cool air on her back lured so much of her attention.

She must have stared at him too long.

"Pidg," he said, squeezing her hand a little. "Say the word, and we'll go."

This was Edward's party. It was Jean's party, and Winry could tell he was trying his damnedest to fix that for her. "Thanks for not letting me fall down," she said instead of an answer.

That loose joint in her neck failed again, and she felt the piping on his uniform coat pressing into her cheek. He adjusted his arm around her back, tightened his grip a little.

"No problem," he said.

They danced another because it was nice just to dangle and let Jean lead. He put her where she was supposed to go and said he could barely feel her through his boots. As the night progressed and, perhaps, the champagne did its rounds, the dance floor got more and more crowded. Winry's head was still decidedly unclear, so she told Jean that she needed a glass of water. He nodded and followed her off the floor.

As they walked toward a table, he put his arm around her shoulder. She looked down at her shoulder then up to his face. Winry's intention was not to question him, but it must have come off that way because he whispered, "Trying to help you walk a straight line."

They moved through occupied tables, full of austere-looking men and what Winry thought were painfully elegant women, and she felt a rush of gratitude for Jean every time someone cast a sidelong glance at them.

When he tried to sit her down at an empty table, she refused. "I need to walk more," she said as the post-fun-stage of drunk crept up into her blood. Now she felt rather tired and distracted and just dizzy. Jean got out of her way when she staggered up to the bar. He did, however, intercede before she could open her mouth and pour stupid out to the bartender.

Jean put up his index and middle fingers of his right hand. "Gimme two waters," he said to the nearest bartender.

"Do you think all those people could tell I was drunk?" she whispered to Jean as they took seats at the bar. Winry propped herself up on the bar while Jean rotated in his seat and rested his elbows on the edge behind him.

"I've got your back," he said. "With luck, they'll all just think you're ass over teakettle for me."

Winry didn't find that terribly comforting. "I didn't mean to get drunk," she said. That was kind of a lie, but she really hadn't meant to get _that_ drunk. At least, if she had known how much worse getting that drunk was going to make the situation, she wouldn't have.

The ice was clinking in her glass when she lifted it to her mouth. "Why are you shaking like that?"

"These things make me nervous," was all Winry said.

He began turning little partial circles on his squeaky barstool. "Why's that?"

She scrunched up her face and looked over her shoulder at the crowd. "I feel like they're all judging me."

"You know," Jean said, after a long draw from his drink, "Other than having the nicest biceps in this room, there's nothing about the way you look that would make you stick out in this group."

It did not even occur to her that she could be offended by that—in fact, he had managed to compliment her and calm her down—until he put up his hands and stammered out, "I don't mean you don't stand out or anything, Pidg. Because you do." He had lost her. Her face must have shown it because he went on. "You're probably the nicest looking girl in here, which makes you stand out plenty, but I'm just saying no one would know you don't belong." He paused. "Because you do belong. I mean, you could. You have every right to be here." He was starting to look a little deflated, so Winry rested a hand on his knee.

"That's a sweet thing to say," she told him. He looked grateful.

They worked at their waters and hung around the bar a while longer. Jean whispered stories to her about the men and women who passed, and Winry had to snort into her hand quite a few times. She could tell he was feeling encouraged by her laughter, and she was just fine with that. Also, and she didn't know if this was intentional or not, but Jean told her a lot of really unflattering things about these people, and she wondered if he were trying to make her more comfortable. Level the playing field a little.

While they chatted, Winry was distantly aware of the music playing in the background. Only when Jean stopped mid-sentence and looked over at the dance floor did she really pay it any attention. Winry looked over as well. The band had started a fast, bouncy number, and almost immediately, the age demographic on the floor changed drastically. Just about everyone over thirty retreated to their tables, leaving a flock of young soldiers and even younger women.

"Ngh," Jean grumbled.

Winry couldn't help but chuckle. "What?"

"They're jitterbuggin'. I love jitterbuggin'."

He didn't sound like a man talking about something he loved. "I don't know how," Winry said. "Do you want to teach me?"

He watched them a moment longer than she expected him to. And when he looked back at her, he had a tight, almost apologetic smile on his face. "Give me a ring in six to eight months when I'm through physical therapy."

She heard that tinkling, crystalline sound you hear when your heart breaks from sympathy for someone other than yourself, and she let a compassionate smile dance over her features for only a moment. Winry put a hand on his forearm. "Why don't you just upgrade to automail? I'll outfit you for cheap."

"Forget that," he said, and for a moment, she was afraid she had offended him. "Charge full price. We'll submit the invoice to HR and be done with it."

That surprised her a little. She wasn't accustomed to her attempts to make someone feel better actually succeeding. Typically, she was just putting one dinky bandaid on a big, old wound, and Winry could tell that she had touched on an acre of hurt within him. Still, he smiled at her, like he had actually noticed her trying to make it better, like it might have worked, even if in the smallest of ways.

Winry felt encouraged. "Well, we should go ahead and schedule something then."

He turned toward his left, to face her, and put his weight on a single elbow against the bar. "I could pencil you in tomorrow for lunch."

There was that bubble of excitement in her chest, which, had she not swallowed it down, probably would have come out as a giggle. "Okay," her voice said, breathier and higher than she expected it to. Jean grinned crookedly at her.

And then Winry saw him. He materialized over Jean's shoulder. If she had known it would happen, if she had had even the slightest inkling that it would happen, she never would have agreed to come to that stupid gala at all. She saw a tail of blonde hair over blue-coated shoulders. He was practically draped over the bar, leaning heavily on his right arm with his back rotated toward her. But she saw the gloved hand, the slumped posture, and the telltale jerkiness of a man with automail in dire need of a tune-up.

It was Edward.

Winry felt her world telescope in on him. As he turned on his stool to face the bar, the hollowness of his stubbly cheek, the dark circles under his eyes, the pale papery tightness of his skin all closed around her trachea like a fist. And she knew, as her eyes refused to shift away, that she was not going to be as okay with seeing him as she would pretend to be.

And he looked terrible. Like he needed sleep and a descent meal and a friend.

Winry hadn't made any effort to find Ed when she moved to Central. She heard his name in other people's conversations—it's hard to live in a military town and work on automail without hearing about him—but she would always hear it, latch on for just a moment, and then release it down the river. It was almost to the point where it was painless. Not easy, though. Never easy, but it was more like pushing a door closed on a windy day than like ripping a rotten tooth out of her head.

But he was still a wind at Winry's door. Still pushing to get back in. And he didn't even know it. And if he did, Winry would have bet her next paycheck that he wouldn't care.

How do you ignore a whole chapter of your life when it comes up and sits a few seats down from you at the bar? But how do you say _fuck him_ to a man who looked like he'd just stopped taking care of himself?

How do forgive yourself when you've been saying _fuck him_ for a year? When, perhaps, if you had done something sooner, he wouldn't be sitting alone at a bar, looking sick and thin.

Winry's heart started to race, and her blood was still so thin that she could hear the rush in her ears. She took a breath and another, but she couldn't seem to fill her lungs, like something was cinching them in the middle.

A hand fell on her upper arm.

"Pidg?" Jean said. "You're pale as a sheet."

Winry blinked and the world widened again. There was Jean sitting next to her.

"You gonna puke?"

She assessed herself for a moment. "Maybe."

"Let's get some air," he said knowingly, nodding toward the large doors that opened onto a terrace along one wall of the ballroom. Winry nodded her agreement. Before she could even get off her stool, Jean was up and closing an arm around her shoulders. It wasn't that sort of casual, affectionate gesture business. It felt like he was pinching her together, and he used it to steer her the hell out of there.

The big, glass-paned doors all stood open, and Jean held aside the airy curtains and let Winry pass under his arm. They moved out onto a wide, marble terrace, bordered by a heavy balustrade. A few other people spotted the area sparsely, and Winry felt blessedly alone out there.

Just being away from the bar and out of the thick heat a room full of people generates loosened up her lungs, and Winry was gulping down air without realizing it. She dropped her elbows onto the railing and leaned herself forward.

"You want me to hold back your hair?" Jean asked as he rested a hip against the railing to her right. He set his hand between her shoulder blades, and if she weren't so distracted, it probably would have felt like a jolt.

"No, I'm okay," Winry said. "I just needed to breathe."

"Did something set you off back there, or was it just the champagne?"

He sounded concerned. Sincerely concerned. Winry looked up at him. His brow was drawn together, and he was tilted just slightly over the railing so he could get a better view of her face.

Winry realized then that she was being embarrassingly demanding. She had always tried so hard not to be that way, which made it all the more embarrassing. She had been so proud of being low maintenance, of being the kind of girl you could leave without seeing her flinch. She had cultivated that, practiced the routine while _absolutely not flinching_.

Because he hadn't been flinching when he left. Winry wasn't going to be the one with her heart in her lap because, unless Edward pulled his out of his luggage once he was on that train, there were no naked, vulnerable affections on his end.

And he, goddamn him, was not going to get through to her. Not this time.

And why would he? If Winry didn't bare herself, wide open and waiting, he would never get in, right? It's not like he was going to try.

"Why did you bring me here?" Winry asked. She hung her head from her shoulders and looked up at Jean.

He shrunk away a little and withdrew his hand. "I... I thought you'd have a good time. Catch up with old friends."

She looked down. "That's not what I meant. I mean, me. Why'd you bring _me?_"

Winry could tell that that startled him. It was kind of a doozy of a question for a first date. "Oh, well, um," Jean cleared his throat. He fished a cigarette out of the inner pocket in his coat and lit it with a match that he tossed off the balcony. "First of all, you're beautiful." He said it so matter-of-factly that Winry could almost accept it. And more importantly, he said it like it was _a_ factor, but it wasn't _the_ factor. "I'm looking around this party and wondering how many of these people are asking what radio contest a clown like me would have to win to get a date with a girl like you."

Winry snorted. She couldn't help it.

"Secondly, you're a lot smarter than I am, and I like that in a girl," he added.

What she had done to give him that impression, she had no idea.

"And," he started and hesitated. Winry watched him struggle with the words, and had she been wearing socks, they would have taken off down the veranda and out into the gardens below. The closest equivalent she had to socks at that moment would have been her pantyhose, and Winry was starting to notice him inadvertently charming those off, too. "I know it sounds corny, but I respect you as a mechanic."

Winry didn't expect that. It was really sincere-sounding and downright original, and Winry didn't know men could do that.

He went on when she looked up. "You're holding your own in a field dominated by men twice your age. And, on top of that, you're really good at it." He shrugged. "I think anyone who doesn't notice all that has got to be blind and half-dumb."

Winry would have given anything to have the right string of words just then, to be able to put more delicately, _I sure do like you a lot_. She wanted to tell him how much she appreciated his sincerity and how taken aback she was by him and how, compared to her last Officer's Ball, the night had still been pretty rough, but only because she was an idiot. He had done everything right. Everything.

Instead she asked, "Do you want to dance again?"

And later that night, when Winry was standing on her stoop one step above him and still looking up, Jean asked, "Can I kiss you yet?" and she said, "Okay." And that was amazing because she hadn't been kissed in a year, and she hadn't been properly kissed ever, which Winry did not know until he did it.

At her door, for the few seconds when Jean was kissing her goodnight, all those distracting buzzings on the periphery of her mind dimmed blissfully. Even the aching in her feet faded. Her senses were overwhelmed by his hands on her upper arms and his mouth on hers. He smell liked cigarette smoke and soap and aftershave, and in the little part of her brain that she could tear away from that axis-wobbling kiss, she thought of the intimacy of it. Of inhaling the breath that had just come out of his lungs, of breathing in the air off his skin. And if only she could bottle that moment, she would have spent the rest of the night taking shots of it.

He told her to come find him tomorrow at the Autoshop at headquarters. Winry said that she would, and he waited until her door was unlocked and she was inside before getting into his car.

But as soon as they were apart, the buzzings came back. Winry went to bed thinking of Edward at the bar, and when she wasn't doing that, she was feeling like a monster for it.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Put a band aid over that paper cut, hon, 'cause you'll be handling some citrus this chapter. Thanks, y'all.

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**II.**

Jean might have given her directions to the Autoshop the night before, but hell if Winry could remember them. Instead, she took the bus to the stop nearest the main entrance to Central Headquarters. She imagined that most of the people who belonged inside headquarters had cars with clearance tags that could get them into security cleared parking decks, and they never had to do what she was doing, which was feign purposefulness as she strode toward the big, marble portico on the front of headquarters.

Perhaps if she weren't clutching a picnic basket, Winry would have blended in better. Also, perhaps if she weren't wearing a little rusty rose number with a sweetheart neckline and a hem her fingertips only brushed, she would have been more confident that they would take her seriously. Oh, yes, and she was shaking: Winry had done a bang up job of making an absolute ass of herself the night before, and she kept thinking that, had Jean not been drinking, he wouldn't have kissed her goodnight or asked her to see him again or told her where he worked. And she didn't know if novice terrorists got so nervous they shook or if their shaking looked much like that of a hungover and incessantly chagrined girl on a second date or if the receptionist at the end of the vestibule could tell the difference.

"Hi, there," Winry said when she approached the desk.

The woman gave her a once over and went back to filing her nails. Winry set her picnic basket by her feet.

"I'm trying to find Lieutenant Jean Havoc in the Autoshop." She remembered that much.

"Do you have an appointment?"

Did she have an appointment? _It's more like a date_, Winry thought. But was it a date? She could picture herself rolling up at the shop to find Jean surprised and scrabbling for reasons why he couldn't do the lunch thing with her. Then the unimpressed look on the receptionist's face really began to strike Winry, and she wondered how many girls she'd seen wandering wide-eyed up to her and asking where Jean was.

And Winry really didn't want any of that to be true.

"Um, I think he's expecting me?" Winry offered.

The woman blew dust off her nails and picked up the phone. She asked the switchboard for Autoshop, waited a moment, and then, to Winry's _horror_, asked for _Major_ Havoc. Now, not only was Winry another girl in another dress lost on Jean's trail but she was also one who sounded like she had been off the trail for a long time. Why didn't he tell her he got promoted?

The receptionist spoke quietly into the phone before covering the receiver. She looked up at Winry. "Name?" she said.

And then Winry forgot her name. She wanted to grab the phone and tell Jean just to meet her on the front steps, or better yet, to fuck off. "Um, Winry Rockbell," she managed.

The receptionist repeated it into the phone, made some affirmative noises, and hung up. She gave Winry a visitor's badge, and while Winry was trying to figure out how to clip the thing to the front of her dress, she gave her directions through the complex to the garage. It involved leaving the main entrance, going around the back, taking some turns and maybe some stairs, and possibly uttering some magic words.

Winry decided to walk around until she saw the big open doors, hydraulic lifts, and a bunch of cars.

And because nothing ever simply worked out in her life, Winry was shocked and, perhaps, overly relieved when it, indeed, worked. She came around the rear of a big, low, corrugated steel-sided building, and the street opened into a large parking lot with maybe twenty sedans, buses, and the occasional forklift situated around the perimeter. Three big garages stood open at the back of the building, and she could see two cars on lifts to boot.

Winry came up to the first garage door. She could smell grease and sweat and gasoline, and a fan whirred somewhere beyond her vision. There was a heavy, black sedan parked on the cement in there with its hood up, and Jean and another mechanic were reaching over the car's black insides for something behind the engine block.

Winry came just within the garage and rested her hand on the wall. She cleared her throat. The man to Jean's left looked up and gave her a face that let her know that Jean, at least, did not make a habit of bringing women into the garage. He jabbed an elbow in Jean's side to get his attention.

Jean looked up at his colleague first before looking over at Winry.

"Hey, Pidg!" he said and stood up straight. Either he was surprised that she actually made it from the front desk to there or he was just that excited to see her. "We'll finish this after lunch," he said to the other man, who stood there, staring.

Winry might have been flattered if it weren't so goddamn awkward.

"Hey, Dale," Jean said, his voice harsher, "Take a hike."

"Sir!" he said, snapped a salute, and took a hike.

Jean came around the car, a big old grin on his grease-smudged face. The skin around his eyes was significantly less dirty than the rest of his face, and the welding goggles pushing his straw-colored bangs out in odd angles let Winry know why. He pulled a grubby handkerchief from his back pocket and rubbed hard at his hands. He had a laminated ID card clipped to the breast pocket of his gray coveralls, and that was about as close as he got to the military aesthetic.

"I didn't know if you were going to remember that you said you'd come by."

God, did he have to bring it up first thing? That she was sloppy, dumb drunk only ten hours before? That she was messy and fall-down-y all over him? Yes. Yes, he did. Winry must have made a face that said all that because he began to laugh.

"I'm really sorry," she said, looking at her little ballet flats. What the hell was she thinking wearing a dress and dainty little shoes to a garage? In fact, what the hell was she doing there at all?

"Just be glad you weren't my date to the Officer's Ball three years ago. Would have made you look like a kindergarten teacher," he said as he partially unzipped his coveralls, slipped his arms out, and tied the sleeved around his waist. "You got a present for me in there?" he asked, pointing at the picnic basket Winry had forgotten she had.

Turns out, Jean in a V-necked undershirt, all sweaty and greasy, and lavishing Winry with attention tended to make her forget a lot. It was those arms. It had been very generous of him to compliment her biceps the night before. She could see where rivulets of sweat had run down his skin under his sleeves, and the urge to trace them with her index fingernail was like gravity.

And Winry just knew she was blushing, damn it.

"It's for both of us," she said, lifting the basket up to her chest. "Do you have a place to sit around here?"

He looked around. To the left, a short hallway led back to a closed door with a chalkboard on it. There were all kinds of to-do lists and notes written on it along with a long, slotted rack for timecards. To the right, the garage stretched out in a long corridor, filled with rolling tool cabinets, a welding station surrounded by heavy, flame-retardant curtains, and, of course, cars, all open-hooded or tire-less or in different states of dysfunction.

Jean laughed and scratched the back of his head. "I usually go to the cafeteria," he admitted. "I don't get pretty ladies bringing me lunch very often."

And now, Winry was decidedly blushing. "This will do," she said as she turned and sat in the open passage, her feet sticking out into the sun just beyond the short awning.

"You're gonna get your dress dirty doing that," Jean said as he came up to her left.

"I don't wear anything I can't wipe my hands on," Winry said, feigning as much confidence as she could. It must have worked because Jean shrugged and sunk down to the concrete next to her. Winry set the basket on the concrete between them. He sat with his long legs all folded up and crossed and rested his elbows on his knees while she tried to tuck her feet up next to her demurely.

"Today's menu includes Dublith peaches," Winry pulled two out and set them in her lap, "farmer's cheese," she put a lidded ceramic tub on the concrete, "and blueberries." They came in a light, wicker quart with a little braided handle, which she set next to the tub.

"Wow," Jean said as Winry pushed the basket out of the way. "Way to take me back."

He opened the wire latch on the ceramic tub and pinched out a small, white ball of soft cheese. He popped it into his mouth and looked rather nostalgic as he chewed.

"Back where?"

He swallowed. "My mom used to make farmer's cheese. Might be fifteen years since the last time I've had any. And blueberries," he gently raked his fingers over the top of the berries, scooping up a fist. He tossed one into the air and it landed squarely in his mouth. "Me and my brothers used to go down to a You Pick place about a mile from our farm. You pay for a bucket and take home as much as you can carry."

That sounded awfully rural. "Where are you from?"

"Same place you're from," he said and popped in another berry. "Risembool."

"Really?"

"You know Havoc Beef?"

Did Winry know Havoc Beef. It was one of the biggest cattle ranches in Risembool. She used to walk by their big, white barn with the words "Havoc Herefords" painted on it to get to the hardware store. Why hadn't she made that connection? "You mean the people who close down Main Street once a week for a cattle run? So when you're ahead of them you have to run?"

"And when you're behind them you have to dodge cow pies," he finished like it was a slogan. "Yes, I'm of the Risembool Havocs," he said with a contrived air of prestige. "It's my brother's farm now."

This was nice. This was how normal people talk, isn't it? "How many siblings do you have?"

"Got two older brothers. Taylor and Loren." He saw Winry's look of confusion. "Yeah, I know. Taylor, Loren, and Jean. I think my mom wanted daughters."

Winry choked on a blueberry and coughed and laughed.

He put on that backwoods, Risembool accent that Alphonse, Edward, and Winry used to mock so hard. It was as thick as cream. "Learned everything I could about tractors, got real good at readin' and 'rithmetic, and moved to the big city to seek my fortune." He looked wistfully off into the distance.

Winry didn't realize people like that actually existed. Jean was the sort of man they used to put in propaganda moving pictures to inspire national pride. In fact, Winry could distinctly remember a poster with a picture of a tow-headed boy on a tractor at the top and then the same boy in a blue uniform at the bottom.

"So why the military?" she asked and picked up a peach.

He dropped a handful of blueberries into his mouth and chewed thoughtfully. "They would pay for me to get my degree, and I knew I wouldn't get anywhere without that." He shrugged. "I imagine that's why everyone who isn't an alchemist enlists."

How benign. No vendettas? No passionate, painful quest or journey in which the military could be a stepping stone to a greater goal? God, Jean was normal. It was so refreshing.

"And now you're a major? Thanks for telling me about the promotion, by the way," Winry added sarcastically. "Made me look like an idiot when I asked for _Lieutenant_ Havoc."

He chuckled. "Sorry about that. You're about to drool on yourself, Pidg," he said and pointed at her chin. Winry had sunk her teeth into her peach, and at first, the skin had resisted, but when it gave, it gave with a burst of syrupy juice. She could feel a fat drop hanging off her chin, and Jean reached out just in time. He hooked his index finger under her chin and swiped the drop away. He wiped his hand on his pant leg.

Winry faltered at that. He hadn't hesitated or anything before just reaching right out, and she could feel this sort of after-sensation from the calluses on his finger scraping her skin. And because Winry typically resorted to defensiveness when someone took her out of her comfort zone, she said, "Well, you've got engine grease on your face."

He frowned at her. "Maybe I'm saving it for later. Did you think of that?"

He deflected like a private just fresh from basic training, and Winry felt her prickliness smoothed away as easy as that. She had never known anyone who used humor to defuse her quite so effectively.

Winry then remembered one last item in her basket. "I snuck a couple beers in, by the way," she said, flipping open the basket and putting her hand in. She felt the cold, sweating glass against her fingertips. "Hair of the dog that bit you. Will you get in big trouble if you have one?"

"I could get away with it," he said, "But I don't drink."

Winy blinked. "But you drank last night, didn't you?" She narrowed her eyes at him and teased, "And what about making me look like a kindergarten teacher?"

He laughed. "Nope, that was just orange juice last night," was all he said.

And there he went, being unreadable again. Winry thought he could tell that she was trying to figure that angle out because he ate another cheese ball, stood up, and strolled out into the sun. Clearly, it wasn't something he wanted her poking around in. She squinted out into the parking lot where he stood with his back to her. Winry saw him bow his head down for a moment and then straighten and blow a cloud of smoke upwards.

He had some landmines, it seemed. And Winry was clumsy and heavy-footed and stomping around in a field that once was a battleground.

She stood up and followed him. Winry came up to his right. "So I get sloppy drunk on our first date." She ticked it off on her index finger. "I open my big dumb mouth on our second." She ticked it off on her middle finger. When Jean did not say anything, Winry slumped a little. She reached up and took the cigarette out of his mouth and put it in hers.

"That's a nasty habit, you know."

Winry couldn't tell if he was talking about smoking or opening her big, dumb mouth, but his statement certainly applied to both. "It reminds me of my internship in Rush Valley. Everyone smoked there." She took one drag and then a second and passed it back to him. Immediately, her blood began to feel thin and fast through her head.

He took the cigarette back and puffed at it to keep the cherry lit. "You weren't sloppy drunk. You're just a lightweight, Pidg." He tapped the cigarette with his index finger, knocking off the ash. "Something got you last night, though, didn't it? Something set you off."

Winry supposed that she deserved his probing. It was only fair. She already knew a lot more about him than he probably made a habit of revealing to girls two dates in: he'd taken a bullet some time ago, and like so many battlefield injuries, it was the gift that kept on giving; and he was an alcoholic in recovery. Another wartime friend for life, she'd learned from working in the COG.

He was feeling like he'd shown too many of his cards, Winry thought. And other than disclosing that she was insecure around townies, she didn't have any skin in the game. So, Winry decided to tell him. "I saw Edward there last night," she confessed.

"I thought he was an old friend of yours," Jean said around his filter.

"Among other things, yeah." Winry looked at the scuffs on her shoes.

"You and him had a thing?"

She snorted. "For about six minutes." Her face heated up just saying it, but Winry felt almost justified. Jean choked on smoke and began to cough. He mixed laughing and sputtering for a minute. "It was a year ago, and I hadn't seen him since," Winry added.

"Must have been quite a shock, then," Jean finished for her once his voice came back to him. Just his putting it like that, reducing that dizzying overwhelm and all the painful things that came with it, made her feel better. Like he'd taken the whole thing in his grip, compressed it down to a little palmful, into a snow globe she could turn over in her hands. And being there with him made Winry want to put it up on the mantle and forget about it. "You want me to give him a black eye?" he asked. When Winry laughed, he went on, "I wouldn't get discharged. He doesn't outrank me anymore."

"That's very generous of you," she said.

He was doing that thing where he was smiling right at her, and there weren't any secrets in it. He wasn't trying to hide or make her guess or anything. He was laying it out right there. And it made Winry feel awfully naked. She looked down at her chipped fingernails. "I think you have a right to know," she said, scrabbling for every word as they came out, "but I've never really done this before, but I like you a lot, and I'm doing my best." She sounded like a child in her ears, and she half-expected Jean to laugh awkwardly and start backing away.

The next few motions happened so quickly Winry hardily had time to react. Jean put his hand over hers where they were hovering before her sternum and closed his fingers. Winry looked up and then was abruptly being very soundly kissed. She had her eyes open, and she could see the lines in his skin around his eyes and his light-colored eyelashes. She smelled his sweat and the metallic tang of engines and heat. She tasted his cigarette and the blueberries she had brought and that unique kind of wet, intimate earth-flavor of another person's mouth. And all she could hear was her heart thundering in her ears.

It was scorching out in the summer sun, the parking lot sending sheets of heat back up at them. It was the middle of the day, and the sun was hanging high and hot overhead, and Winry could have sworn, when Jean let her go, their shadows had stretched. Or perhaps it was just Winry's world that had stumbled forward a bit in its rotation.

"We should get dinner sometime," he said. If he was trying to hide the self-satisfied grin on his face, he was doing a poor job of it.

Somewhere, Winry remembered someone telling her to pace herself when dating. You don't want to let whoever it is you're trying to trick into liking you get too much. You don't want to flood the market. Demand has to outweigh supply.

"What are you doing tomorrow night?" Winry blurted.

"Having dinner with you, I think," he answered just as quickly.

They set up a time and a place and sort of worked out a plan, and then Jean's subordinates began filing back from lunch, and then the looks they were getting cued them both to wrap it up. He kissed her again, right there in the parking lot, in front of five or six mechanics, and while part of Winry was mortified, another part was fluttering and bouncing around because he did it in public, where everyone could see and know about it and give him shit for it later. Once she was around the corner of the building where Jean couldn't see her, she slumped against the metal siding, set down her basket, and clapped her hands over her cheeks. Her heart raced, and Winry couldn't feel the pavement under her feet, and it was happening so fast, like she was tumbling down a hill with nothing to grab on to. What was at the bottom of that canyon, she didn't know, and at the moment, she couldn't bring herself to care at all. She was having an awfully good time falling.

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Jean came over to her apartment at four, and they walked down the street to the market. He did things like carry her shopping basket and rest his hand on her lower back and pay for her groceries. They bought some snapper filets and new potatoes and ears of corn. He bought her a jug of fresh cream and a paper sack of ground coffee, too, because they passed the roaster's kiosk, and Winry mentioned something about being out. When they saw a Havoc's Beef storefront and he knew the man behind the counter, Jean finagled a free chuck roast for her.

As Winry marinated the filets, Jean did all the hard stuff. He scrubbed and boiled and mashed the potatoes, which Winry hated doing because it always took so damn long. He took it a step further, too, and dropped in garlic he had chopped. When Winry saw him open her meager spice cabinet and begin rubbing his chin, she asked him what he was looking for.

"Nothing in particular," he answered, making bottles and jars clink as he moved them around. "I'm making this up as I go."

Winry looked down at her half of dinner. She was following Grandma's snapper recipe down to the pinch of pepper.

As the corn and fish roasted, they sat at her dinner table—a dinky little, round thing that was just bigger than the wrought iron table they drank coffee at that first day—and Winry set out a plate of sliced tomatoes and leftover blueberries between them.

Jean told her about being in college in Central and majoring in Political Science. "I would get my degree in a field that completely changed, top to bottom, within a decade." He told her about basic training. "You never know how big a bitch you are until you have to do a hundred push-ups at 5:45 in the morning." And growing up on a farm. "I've got this knee jerk reaction to spring time. I hate it. That's when we'd brand all the calves and artificially inseminate the cows and do all kinds of horrible things to the bulls."

Then they were eating the dinner they had cooked together—that was Jean's suggestion, not Winry's—and he was asking her about Risembool since he'd left it and about automail and about her plans now that she was establishing herself in Central. He told Winry to consider the university and to join him next time he went to do tractor repairs for Farmer Splitz just south of town.

"I've got to show you Splitz's hives. He's got the most beautiful bees," Jean said reverently, making a sweeping motion with his fork. "He's got a honey harvest coming up, too."

"You're a beekeeper?" Winry asked incredulously.

He shrugged. "I wouldn't call myself a _keeper_, per se," he answered. When she started laughing, he frowned. "What?" he asked, his voice dropping an octave.

"Is there anything you don't do?"

He thought for a moment. "I would be hard pressed to build someone an arm."

It would be so easy, Winry thought right then, looking at him swirl his mashed potatoes into a point with his fork, to forget everything she thought she knew about men—which was, honestly, everything she knew about _Edward_, she was beginning to see—and let him reteach her. Winry came into it with this set of expectations, and while she wouldn't go so far as to say she knew Jean, it would be no stretch to say that he was giving all her expectations the black eye he was saving for Edward.

And maybe Winry was born in love with Edward, but she was also born small and weak like all children. With Jean sitting at her dinner table, drinking her sweet tea with lemon, Winry thought about what she had been looking for, or rather, what she hadn't known to look for. Maybe she only thought she wanted a precocious boy like Edward. Maybe she wanted a boyish man like Jean.

He took a refill of her sweet tea and settled on to her couch. Winry told him not to look as she put a blueberry pie she had baked earlier into the oven to reheat.

She was a little afraid he was appraising her flat while he sat there. It was one big room with a kitchen and dining area to the right of the door. To the left of the door was a long, low bookshelf that, combined with a big area rug, she used to separate the sitting room from the kitchen. The bulk of her apartment was sitting room, and from where Jean was sitting, he could see the raised alcove where she kept her bed and wardrobe. Winry kept a folding screen near the wall, just before the step up, and it didn't quite hide her "bedroom." Still, she had made her bed and changed the sheets because she knew that anyone else in her position, possibly someone who knew what she was doing, would expect company for the night. And she was doing absolutely everything in her power not to think about it. But there he was on her couch, sipping her tea. Winry watched the back of his head for a moment from the kitchen, feeling waves of heat coming off the oven, and she wondered what he was expecting.

As she came into the sitting area, Winry reached up and tugged on the chain to get the ceiling fan going. She took off the cardigan she was wearing and realized only after the fact that she had just taken off a piece of clothing in front of Jean. It was completely unintentional, and she wanted Jean to know that, but she would have to be a significantly bigger novice than she was to try to tell him.

"I've got a treat for you," Winry said as she sat next to him. And, oh, God, that sounded a lot more suggestive than she meant it to.

Jean sniffed the air. "Will I ruin it by guessing?"

"Yes," she snapped, frowning. "Just act surprised when it comes out of the oven."

"Can do," he said.

It was still oppressively hot in her apartment even away from the oven, and he was the only one there with a drink. Winry reached over, took his glass out of his hand, and drew a long sip off it. She plucked at the front of her shirt to make some kind of breeze over her chest.

"Did you get in trouble yesterday?" she asked when they'd both been quiet for too long.

"What for?"

Winry looked at his feet on her coffee table. "For having a visitor at work?"

"Oh, that," he said. "Uh, not really. I didn't get in trouble. I got some grief for it, for sure. We don't get many women through there."

"I figured."

The air was thick with blueberry pie by that point, and they decided it was time. Winry had some vanilla ice cream left in her icebox, and she piled big, melty scoops on top of fat slices of pie. They brought their dessert to the couch, and Winry didn't realize how nervous she was for Jean's approval of her pie until he was scraping the sauce and ice cream soup up with his fork and she hadn't eaten more than three bites of hers.

"Dang," he said after pulling his fork out of his mouth one last time. "I've eaten better these last two days than I have in a long time." Winry guessed her face said how anxious she was because he added, "You can make limbs out of metal and a mean blueberry pie. I'm impressed."

Winry grinned and collected their plates.

Then they were approaching that jumping off point that would determine whether Jean was going to drive home that night or not. There really wasn't a part of Winry that wanted him to, and she wondered if there should have been.

"Should I expect to see you around the COG any time soon?" Winry asked once they were both settled on the couch with fresh, dewy glasses of sweet tea.

It looked a though a switch was suddenly flipped in him. Boy, was that the wrong question to ask. But it was out. And Jean was looking at his feet and drawing spirals in the condensation on his drink. He cleared his throat. "I've got the initial appointment Tuesday next week."

What comes after that? What would a normal person ask after puking up a stupid question like that? Honestly, Winry was so curious about what put him in physical therapy, and she was selfish enough not to realize until much later that that was not a good reason to force him to talk about uncomfortable things. But Jean was a good sport, perhaps a better sport than she deserved.

"Can I ask what happened?"

She was pushing him so hard, and she knew it. Why was she doing that? What made her think that was okay?

He had every right to get up and leave right then. But he didn't.

"I got shot while I was stationed in Briggs during the border dispute four years ago," he said, still watching his tea. "Right here," he said, setting his index and middle fingers against his chest below the curve of his left clavicle.

It sounded like something he didn't discuss much. And Winry wondered if he had friends in his shop he talked to about it. Did men even do things like that? From the look on his face, Winry guessed not.

"I was in PT for a year or so after it happened, but I did a real number on my shoulder. It never healed right after the surgery, and it started acting up this winter." He put a hand on his left shoulder. "I need it working now, though, and hell if I have the time to get it working." He laughed. "I'm not used to things being more complicated than an overhaul can fix, you know?"

Did she ever. "Sometimes I think I can only fix the things that aren't important," Winry offered.

He looked at her. One of those looks that let Winry know that he was really _looking. _"I think you and me are cut from the same cloth, Pidg," Jean said, smiling at her. It was that sort of quiet, hopeful smiles that wasn't forced but certainly took some effort.

Winry could see what he meant. But she also believed very strongly that she and Edward were cut from the same cloth, too. Jean and Edward, however, were definitely not. They weren't even from the same loom. So what did that mean? Winry was a quilt? Some parts angry, despondent alchemist, and some parts optimistic but weather-worn good ol' boy. Of course, she had some swatches of mechanic in there. Just like Jean. And some swatches of orphan. Just like Edward.

She realized then, though, that the only patches of her that she really wanted to look at were the ones she and Jean shared, and those were the only ones he had seen. There was a lot more to her than that. Jean was the first person she had felt this strongly about since Edward, though, and the thought of Jean's seeing the rest of her was terrifying. In a way that she didn't want to consider.

"In some ways," she answered quietly. When Winry saw him quirking a concerned brow at her, she dodged. "Do you have a scar?"

He blinked. "Uh, yeah."

"Can I see it?"

He swallowed. "I guess so."

Then there was a man on her couch unbuttoning his shirt. Had she anticipated that result, Winry would have brought college back up. Or machinery. Or the weather. Anything, because she was staring and squirming like an infant, and she couldn't for the life of her figure out where to put her eyes.

He was a good five buttons in before he stopped and pulled his collar open wide. He had a sleeveless undershirt on beneath that, ribbed and significantly cleaner than the one he wore under his coveralls. At that point, Winry just looked away. She didn't remember being this shy with Edward. Perhaps it was because when Edward was prancing around in his skivvies, sex seemed like this distant idea, something that had happened once to a friend of a friend.

But not now. Now, Winry had tried it once and got the impression that she could really grow to like it. And it had been a year since she had tried it that first time and, oh, God, _there was a man on her couch unbuttoning his shirt._

"It's right here," Jean said as he pulled the fabric of his undershirt aside and pointed at his chest.

"I don't see it," Winry all but squeaked. She didn't notice that she was sitting with her feet planted on the floor, her hands between her knees, and her eyes staring straight down until Jean reached behind him and turned on the lamp by the couch.

"That's because you're not looking, Pidg," Jean said, sounding a little frustrated. He was, after all, doing what she had asked him to do.

He took her hand and pressed her fingertips to his skin.

"You feel that?" he asked as he dragged her fingers over the skin below his collarbone.

Winry swallowed hard and turned to see what her hand was touching. She felt it then, a soft fissure in his skin. It was uneven, perhaps a few sixteenths of an inch in one place and half an inch in another, and ran from where his clavicle joined his sternum all the way to the hollow of his shoulder. In the yellowy light from the lamp, Winry could see the stark pinkness of the scar, the brutal ineptitude of the doctor who had worked on him.

"Had to get patched up on the front line, so it was a slipshod job at best. My orthopedist now thinks that's probably why it didn't heal right. Says they underestimated how badly my shoulder blade got cracked."

Winry had seen so much worse than that. She had seen men with their arms ripped clean from their shoulders by tractors or their legs severed by trains. She'd seen the blood, felt it on her own face, between her fingers. And she sure as hell had seen scars worse. But at that moment, Winry couldn't think of any of them. She thought of Jean getting shot on the front line. She thought of him in the trenches, alone.

"I'm so sorry," she said as she traced his scar over and over.

He didn't answer. Instead, he straightened his undershirt and then his collar. In that series of motions, though, Winry caught of glimpse of something else on him. On the opposite side of his sternum, a curved, white mark, and she blurted, "More battle scars?" before she could stop herself. And she truly should have stopped herself.

"Not quite," he said when he saw where she was looking. He pulled down the neck of his shirt to reveal a different mark entirely. It was, perhaps, three inches wide. A stylized _H_ circumscribed by a circle. The lines were smooth and even and looked much older. "That's a cattle brand."

Winry didn't follow. "What?"

Jean righted his collar again and began buttoning before Winry could say anything else. He chuckled a quiet, resigned chuckle. "If there was one thing Dad loved more than his herd, it was his gin."

It took a moment to sink in. They stared at each other, and Jean looked like he was waiting for her to do something.

And then she got it.

Winry clapped a hand over her mouth and hopped up. Like the pressure of that notion was so great that she had to move. Where she was headed or why, Winry wasn't sure, but just for that moment, she couldn't be sitting next to him. She couldn't be in the proximity of such a transgression. Because she had seen bad things happen to people, and she had seen bad people in action, but she had never seen cruelty like that.

Winry felt a layer of her naivete slough off and wither. It was the part of her that would never believe that a person could do that or, more importantly, that a person could survive that. Winry strode toward her bedroom and stopped, one hand resting on the frame of the folding screen.

It was a marquee in her head.

_His father branded him. His father branded him. His father branded him._

How could a person do that? How could a person survive that?

Winry heard Jean stand up and clear his throat. He came up behind her but didn't touch her. "I should probably head out," he said. "I apologize. That's not very polite conversation, I know."

Winry spun on him. "I don't understand," she said. She felt the constriction in her throat, the stinging in her nose, and she knew that she had absolutely no right to cry.

"What," he said.

She sniffed and rubbed at her eyes with the back of her hand. Like a child. "I mean, you're standing here, in my house." Winry gestured at his feet like that would help articulate the point she could not. She tried again. "How are you here? How can you sit at my dinner table and laugh at my jokes and eat my cooking?"

"It's not as hard as you think," he answered, smiling at her.

Winry thought he must have realized that she wasn't offended in the way he thought she was; he didn't look like he was ready to dart for the door.

"That's not what I mean," Winry said, scrubbing at her eyes again. She thought of Ed, of course, because he was her only frame of reference for anything male. He would never go on a date to someone's house. He would never go grocery shopping with a girl and cook with her and tell her his terrible secrets. Which were all things she wanted him so desperately to do. With her. But he never would because somehow, like Jean's shoulder, he just never healed right. She did not realize that fact until right then.

Maybe Edward just didn't heal right.

"Aren't you angry? Or hopeless? Or bitter?"

"Well, sure, sometimes," Jean said with a shrug. "But, the truth is, I just had dinner with a girl I like an awful lot who baked me pie and was trying to help me feel better about my life until I made her cry."

Winry laughed one of those croaky, wet laughs.

"So, all things considered, I'm pretty satisfied." He paused. "Not with the making you cry part. I feel like an asshole for that."

Winry shook her head. "I still don't understand. If I were you, I'd... I'd never... I don't know. I don't think I'd function."

Jean laughed. "Function? You're such a mechanic." He put a hand on her upper arm. "Trust me when I say it's taken some practice."

Winry nodded and watched him for a moment, watched that simple sincerity that she still hadn't gotten used to. Then she remembered that she had been crying, and her face was probably all red and swollen and mucus-y. Winry turned away and started wiping her eyes and nose. "I look like a frigging mess," she muttered. "Tears and snot, and I'm a mess."

She felt his hands settle on her upper arms, and she bolted upright. "I think you look just fine. Tears and snot and all."

That seemed very intentional, and now he was waiting to see what she would do. So Winry assessed. It was her call now whether he stuck around or made his way down to the street, and at the moment, there was no part of her that thought he should leave. She looked at her toes, weighed out the options, tried to plan ahead, but she really couldn't see any downside. But there had to be one, right? Men were mostly downsides, right?

Winry was quiet for too long. "Pidg?" he began.

What she would have given to be eloquent. But, well, she was not, so she said with her back to him, "Would you like to stay? Here? Tonight?"

Winry could just hear him smiling when he answered, "I'd like that a lot."

Good thing she had changed those sheets.

They left the pie out and the dishes in the sink and the lamp on by the couch, and certainly in the blur, there were many more things left forgotten. What Winry would remember, though, is this:

First his mouth on her neck. Then his weight on her back. Her hands and knees against her sheets. His hands pressing down on either side of hers. He coaxed her clothes off like water conceding to gravity, and she was as resistant as sand when he nudged her toward the headboard so he could crawl along behind her. Winry felt the mattress sink as his other foot left the floor and his knee settled between hers. His arm looped around her waist, pulled her up against him. His belt buckle digging into her back.

Winry would remember his slow, cautious progression. She would remember his careful, deliberate motions. She would remember his quiet questions of _Is this okay?_ And _Like that?_ And _More?_ She remembered his dog tags against her sternum, sticking to the sweat on her skin. She remembered not being embarrassed when he paused and gave her some suggestions, how to position herself, how to move. She would remember his attentiveness.

She remembered what had changed, what was not as she had remembered it. It didn't hurt exactly, but Jean waited for her to open her eyes and look at him like he was afraid it did. It felt kind of like rubbing the sore muscles in her hands at the end of the day; on a scale of one to ten, if pain was an eight, Jean had her at seven and a half. And there was a world waiting to bloom at seven and half.

And it was amazing. And unexpected. And cataclysmic. Like lightning striking a powerline, and she could watch the electricity traveling down the wire, like resplendent ropey vines, toward the maple in her front lawn. And then the yard was full of flame. And all the lights in the house burst. And then she was in darkness, basking in the lazy, leftover fire still crackling. And maybe the floor was covered in broken glass, but she didn't have anywhere to be, and the blaze was just lovely.

Jean did things like brush her bangs back from her forehead and blow across her skin while he waited for her to catch her breath.

When Winry opened her eyes, he was leaning on his right elbow over her, looking undeniably smug. She narrowed her eyes at him.

"What?"

He grinned. "I can feel you twitching, Pidg." And he looked like it was the greatest compliment anyone had ever paid him. So she left him his smugness because, honestly, she couldn't really think much or say much or move.

He waited, blowing over her chest and shoulders, and she suddenly became aware of how much skin she had and how much he had, and in so many ways, Winry had never been this close to someone for so long. Inch for inch and minute by minute, she started to wonder what would happen if they stayed like this.

"Put up your hand," Winry said.

Jean held his left hand up, palm near her face.

She pressed her fingertips to his, which spread her hand wide. Then she watched their hands and listened closely. She could hear her pulse in her ears, and Jean's heart was beating so hard against her chest that she thought she could hear his, too.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

Only after he asked it did Winry realize how silly she was being. She laughed. "For a minute there, I thought I might be able to hear your thoughts through your skin."

"I bet you can guess what I'm thinking."

She could.

Winry remembered his asking to change positions, asking her to get on her hands and knees once more. She remembered dropping onto her elbows, her forehead to the mattress. She remembered his teeth on her shoulder. She remembered the sounds he made, like a man with his shoulder to a door, and he pushed and pushed until it finally gave and he spilled out onto the other side, which, judging from the way he let all his weight slump against her and from the long, guttural sighs he was letting out, was exactly where he wanted to be.

Winry would remember his hand over hers then, his damp fingers ghosting across her knuckles before settling. She would remember his voice low in her ear when he said, "Thought I'd check for myself."


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: **More fluff. More sex. Thanks, y'all.

**III.**

The first insistent ring of the phone had Winry blinking up at the motes in the air above her. The sun was pouring decidedly through the window in sheets over her bed. The second ring and Winry was rubbing her eyes, disoriented. She wasn't supposed to be seeing sun slanting through her window, was she? She only saw those powdery, yellow beams on weekends, when she allowed herself a few extra hours in bed.

"Oh no!" Winry squeaked. She looked at her alarm clock, sitting peacefully on her bedside table. It was 8:15. "_Oh no!_"

The phone rang again, and Winry threw back the blankets, snatched up a shirt-shaped article from the floor—wait, naked?—and scrambled for the phone by the fridge. She had one of her arms in a sleeve by the time she snatched the receiver off the wall and all but cried, "This is Winry."

It was her supervisor, wondering where the hell she was. Winry didn't bother with an excuse, only somewhat noncommittal apologies—she had become quite distracted by this very odd shirt she was putting on. It was awfully big. Like a man's. She held the receiver between her shoulder and ear as she struggled to fit buttons into buttonholes. As her supervisor continued his rant, Winry pinched the collar of the shirt and held it to her nose. That was definitely not her laundry detergent.

The receiver slipped away from Winry's face and clapped against the wall as her shoulders dropped. She whipped her head toward her bedroom, toward the privacy screen demurely hiding the man who had slept in her bed last night.

The tinny sound of her name through a phone line snatched back her attention. With a start and a squawk, Winry picked up the phone where it dangled by the cord. She stammered out one last apology and a promise to be there as soon as she could, and she hung up the phone without saying goodbye.

The apartment abruptly seemed so quiet. Her ears strained for the sounds of another person, but she couldn't hear him breathing or stirring. In the silence, Winry assessed: oh, my, were her hips ever sore. The cuffs of her shirt hung past her fingertips, and she smelled that faintly sweet, musky smell of a man's deodorant, the sharp nip of aftershave, the stale, cottony hint of cigarettes. Winry lifted the shirt up to her nose once more. Yes, that was the smell of _man_.

She looked around her apartment, saw all the dishes scattered around the kitchen table and the coffee table, saw the chairs untucked and the lamp left on, the general disarray left in the wake of the sincere hurry she had been in the evening before.

Winry pressed the pads of her fingers to her mouth.

She had had _sex!_ This was quite exciting. Sex after a year of semi-voluntary celibacy seemed far more important than any other intimate benchmark she'd encountered—well, the _only_ other intimate benchmark she'd encountered.

All virginities aside—sometimes she wondered if a girl would get her virginity back if she let her registration expire—Winry still reeled just a little bit. She wondered if that's what it was always like. If so, then... _oh, my_. She'd had _no_ idea.

Still, she kept her fingers against her lips as she tiptoed back toward her bed, hoping the phone and her croaking hadn't roused her guest. Winry crept up to the screen and leaned around, careful not to put any weight on the screen itself in case it might creak. She scanned the scene from bottom to top. There were bundled clothes on the floor, her bedspread rumbled up at the foot of the bed, her sheets like a topographical map.

And if that wasn't the back of a blonde head, Winry was hallucinating. If those weren't two arms and a set of shoulders—those were naked and masculine, weren't they?—hugging one of her pillows, the sexual frustration must have been _really_ getting to her.

There was the bubble in her chest, pushing up behind her sternum, and this time, she couldn't stop it, couldn't force it down. So instead, she pressed her balled fists to her mouth, squeezed her eyes shut, and muffled the squealed peel of girlish glee that she simply wasn't strong enough the quash. And then she was bouncing on the balls of her feet, feeling the ache of her hips with each spring. And then she was doing restrained triumphant punches into the air as she shuffled in a little circle over the floorboards.

Jean was there. _He was there._ In her bed! There was a man in her bed, and she'd brought him there, and soon, he was going to wake up, and then they'd be two people, awake and talking.

And...

_Holy hell_, Winry thought as she stopped her victory dance abruptly. _Soon, he was going to wake up, and then they'd be two people, awake and talking._

What was she going to do? Winry didn't really know how two people carried on after the fact when they didn't have a backlog of years of mutual wrong-doing to burn off. She didn't have any history with Jean before a week ago. She didn't have any hatchets to bury in his back. She didn't even have any minor confrontations to work through with him. What was there to say other than something along the lines of _So, we totally had sex last night. Any thoughts?_

Her first impulse was to flee, to leave a note and then hide in the cabinet under her sink and sneak little peeks at Jean as he moved dejectedly around her kitchen.

No. That wouldn't do. What kind of asshole was she?

Winry closed her eyes and braced herself. She'd _totally_ had sex; she could handle this. With all her mettle drummed up to the surface, Winry marched herself around the screen and up to her bed.

She hovered over him for a moment before it started to feel creepy. And for that moment, she let herself drink it in—the musty, earth-smell of hours-old sweat, the deep grooves in Jean's shoulders and arms where everything fit together so well but still left the most alluring seams, the milky morning light over her bed, casting broken blocks of sun across the sheets.

With Jean's shirt still on, Winry gingerly lowered herself back into the bed and drew the sheet over her. She was prepared to settle on to her side of the bed, to keep a good few inches between her skin and his, and to wait for further inspiration. Jean, it seemed, had different plans.

He made a sort of throaty, snore-groan, flopped over onto his other side so that he was facing her, and dropped his arm heavily across her chest.

Winry barely had time to squeak.

He was like a tentacled intimacy monster on a notably demonstrative day, and he dragged her closer with his right arm hooked around her ribs while shoving his left arm under her head.

Winry went entirely rigid for a moment. Then, slowly, she began to see that, well, um, actually, this was kind of nice. She felt his nose buried in her hair, his front—still naked, still masculine—flush with her back, the unyielding swell of his bicep against her ear. Yeah, this was really nice.

And she'd _totally_ had sex with him.

Winry pressed her fist to her mouth once more and mewled into her fingers.

"You sound like a pack of long-tailed mice at marching band practice," Jean muttered into her hair.

Winry jumped and _eeped_. She went entirely stiff.

"Yeah, that right there," he said.

All right, so how would a normal woman reply? Something coquettish about all those other noises she had made? Something about the catalog of noises she made only for him? Perhaps a purr of some kind?

Instead, Winry gulped. Audibly.

Jean began to chuckle. She felt it in her hair, the sensation traveling all the way down her back. "What?" Winry bit out. In her mind, it was firm and demanding. Out loud, it was small and mad. Like a hornet.

"You weren't expecting to see me this morning, were you?"

God, was she so predictable? "I didn't really know what to expect." He was quiet, and Winry wasn't brave enough to look over her shoulder at him. "Don't take it personally," she said tartly. Because getting defensive was _exactly_ what the situation called for. Good job.

They lay still for a moment, but Winry was beginning to twitch. She was so aware of every inch of skin, every motion, so self-conscious of the messages each touch sent. It was overwhelming. When she remembered the angry phone call from her supervisor, all of those factors had her tossing the sheet back brusquely and swinging her feet to the floor.

"Are you wearing my shirt?" Jean asked as he rolled onto his back and put his hands behind his head, the sheet bunched at his waist.

_Thaaat's a naked guy._

"Yes?" Winry managed. She kept her eyes averted and could feel the mingled sensation of cold mortification and very hot flush.

And then Jean was laughing at her again. Frustration was a welcomed reprieve, and Winry latched onto it. She swung her face around to glare at him and punched the mattress next to her left hip.

"What?" she snapped, and Jean had the compassion to temper his laughter.

"You're getting shy, aren't you?" he teased, narrowing his eyes at her suspiciously.

Winry dropped her bright red face. "Shut up, already," she muttered.

With a chorus of sleepy sighs and groans, Jean elbowed himself backwards until he was propped up against Winry's headboard. He reached behind himself and repositioned his pillow. "If it makes you feel any better," he offered, "I haven't seen anyone since I sobered up."

"When was that?"

Maybe he didn't expect her to ask because he cleared his throat and looked at his feet. "Two years ago," he muttered.

It rather did make her feel better. Winry watched his face, the impression of the wrinkled pillowcase still lingering on his scruffy cheek, watched him hook his index finger around the chain of his dog tags and peel them off his skin. Winry did not realize that the impulse had struck her until she was draping herself over him, putting her palms on his ribs, and resting her cheek against his breastbone. He hesitated, his hands hovering away from her, before they settled on her shoulders. And Winry smiled against his skin. She wasn't trying to keep up with an expert or a professional or anything. She was trying to keep up with Jean the Normal Guy. How encouraging.

While Jean made coffee and an omelet for them to split, Winry took a quick shower, brushed her teeth, and dressed in a hurry. Jean had his shirt draped over his arm and really needed a shave when they left for him to drop her off. He told her that he could roll up at work whenever he wanted to, so he could get back to his apartment to do something about the post-coital look he had about him.

When they pulled up to the curb outside the COG, it was about nine. Jean must have mistook Winry's fixing her hair in the mirror for her waiting for him to get the door, so he put his car in park and came around to the passenger side.

While it certainly had been tempered, the shyness was still thick around her. It slowed down her brain and dulled her senses, and Winry couldn't for the life of her think of anything casual or confident to say to Jean when they were standing face to face. So, she said, "Thanks for the ride." Whether she meant the ride last night or the ride that morning, she wasn't entirely sure, and she certainly wasn't going to explore it too hard right then.

"Anytime," he said and kissed her. She could taste his coffee during that lazy, under water sort of kiss, the kind of kiss that really shouldn't happen where anyone could see, the sort of kiss that made her knees puddle in her shoes and her head swim a little, the sort of kiss that she kind of started to compare to all the other kisses she could remember because she had a sneaking suspicion that it might be the best kiss she'd ever received. That's how Jean kissed Winry on the sidewalk outside her office that morning. An honest kiss. A temporary-goodbye kiss. An affirmation kiss.

"So, uh," Jean began, "Don't take too long to let me know if you want to do that again." She half-expected him to get flustered and explain that he meant the dinner-part, not the sex-part, not that he didn't like the sex-part or anything, although—he would explain—if she wanted to do the sex-part again, he was totally down.

But he didn't say any of that.

That would have been the perfect place to say something coquettish and charming, but Winry opened her mouth and all that came out was, "Okay."

x

x

x

If there were anything Winry remembered from the Economics class she took when she was a kid, it was that supply and demand were always in flux and, on the surface, were very simple concepts. Now Winry kept catching herself trying to remember more about how they behaved. Specifically, she tried to recall what her teacher had said would happen when demand is through the roof and supply is a bottomless well and the trajectories of both didn't look like they were going to change any time soon. No market can survive like that, right?

The subsequent week was a whirlwind for Winry as her life became one long episode of the Jean Havoc Radio Hour. And in her daily journal entries, Winry documented the greatest hits:

Jean took her to service Farmer Splitz's tractor and taught her how to hoist up a bale of hay, kick one end hard, and flip it over her head to carry it on her back. After her failed first attempt, which left her sprawled on her back with the hay crushing her chest, Jean almost took away her bale. But Winry was determined that if he could do it, so could she—despite the foot of height difference and the fact that Jean could comfortably bench press about a Winry and a half. It took a few more tries, but once she had it, Winry marched in proud circles around Jean, who stood and watched her in the cool shade of the barn.

x

"They told me," Jean said as he unlocked his front door, "To get a houseplant. If it's alive after a year, get a pet. If the pet is alive after a year, then it might be time to bring a girl home." He didn't tell Winry who _they _were, and she didn't ask. His apartment was in a renovated factory, and all his walls were naked brick. She felt some relief when she saw that his apartment was a larger, more bachelor-ish version of hers. The wall opposite the door had tall, wrought-iron framed windows that stretched up to the ceiling and overlooked the street. The floor was grey concrete with big, threadbare area rugs under the mismatched furniture. One corner of the flat was raised on a platform and closed off by windowed walls, and Winry could see a bed and dresser within. Next to the bedroom was the kitchen and dining area, separated by a bar. "When I moved in," Jean explained as tossed his keys and wallet onto a table by the door, "this was just a big, empty room, but I got the Super to front the money if I did all the labor. I think it's pretty livable now." He introduced Winry to Phil, his split-leaf ficus, and Cooper, his golden retriever.

x

They took Cooper to the park, and Jean showed Winy the most impressive trick in Cooper's repertoire. Jean called it _playing lost_, and he instructed Winry to sit on the grass and "just pretend to be a girl." She watched him and Cooper walk a distance away, and then he crouched down next to the dog, said something quietly to him, and pointed at Winry. Jean then got up and moved farther away. Once he was out of sight, Cooper bounded toward Winry and flopped down in front of her in that unconditional love display that only dogs can pull off.

"Hi, Cooper," she said and scratched his snout.

Jean then came jogging up to her, gasping. "Thank God," he panted. "You found my dog. We were on the other side of the pond, and he just took off." He knelt in front of her and pet Cooper, who was licking Winry's hand. "He seems to have taken a liking to you."

She smiled. "You have such a sweet dog, sir," she chirped in her best high-pitched, nondescript female voice. "You must be a wonderful man with a good job who's great in the sack!"

Jean grinned. "As a matter of fact, I am. Have we met?"

x

Jean told her that possibly the hardest part of sobering up was the guilt. "I did a lot of, you know, asshole things, and they say you're supposed to call all the people you wronged and apologize." This _they_ came up whenever Jean talked about drinking, Winry noticed.

"Like who?" she pressed.

He looked at his feet sticking up from under the flat sheet at the end of the bed—he preferred to sleep with his feet uncovered.

"One really unlucky innkeeper. A bunch of girls who never thought they'd hear from me again. A couple of old friends. My mom."

x

Winry showed him her latest project—an automail right forearm for a man who lost his at the cannery. Jean was awed by her pinprick soldering iron and tiny screwdrivers.

"It just takes practice. You get used to it," she said, looking up at him through her big, magnifying goggles. "I bet you could figure out automail with time."

He snorted. "It's like you take an entire car and cram it into a space the size of a mailbox, Pidg. I think it would take more than time."

x

"Shrink tells me I've got PTSD. You know what that is?" he asked as they smoked his cigarettes on his fire escape. It was two in the morning, and Jean's thrashing had woken Winry up.

"Yeah," she said. "I see it all the time at work."

Jean took a long pull off his cigarette and flicked the ash through the wrought iron grating under them. "Getting Cooper helped a lot. He doesn't let people walk up behind me. Still can't turn my back to a crowd, though."

"Do you think that's what made you drink?"

He chuckled. "Saying I'm an alcoholic is like saying I'm tall, Pidg. It just is."

Winry wondered if that was what _they_ told him.

x

Jean's downstairs neighbor called Saturday afternoon, complaining about the noise.

x

"Okay, we'll start slow," Jean said. He took her left hand and rested it on his arm, just below his right shoulder. He then held her right hand and settled a palm on her waist. "You feel this," he said, giving her arm a shake. "You've gotta keep your frame. Keep your arm steady."

Winry swallowed and nodded.

"And don't look so scared."

She nodded again.

They stood in a grocery store parking lot—what? Yeah, Winry wasn't entirely certain either. What had began as a Sunday evening walk down to the park had metamorphosed into this. Perhaps it was the gramophone playing out of a window above them. Perhaps it was the start of Jean's physical therapy that emboldened him. Perhaps one of them had mentioned Jean's long history of adolescent barn dances or Winry's complete deficit of dancing experience. Whatever the case, Winry found herself putting on her game face as strangers passed the parking lot with puzzled looks.

Jean showed her the steps—right, left, rock back—criticized her wobbly arms, and reminded her to let him lead. But after a few false starts, she got it.

Then they were dancing together in a vacant parking lot at dusk on a Sunday, rocking and skipping and turning. Jean spun Winry so fast and so suddenly that she did not have time to fall. And she was laughing at them, at herself when she stepped on him, at this alien sensation of unadulterated, unabashed fun.

Only when Winry felt Jean seize her sides and start to hoist her up did they both falter. Winry dropped her frame and flopped against him.

"Sorry," Jean panted. He was about to do what he called _a lift_, he explained. "Got a little carried away." He rested a hand on the old scar on his left shoulder, and Winry understood.

x

x

x

The receptionist that afternoon came and knocked on the door of the workshop, and Winry looked up, her vision distorted by the magnifying goggles she had on. The receptionist jabbed a thumb over her shoulder and said that Winry had a call at the front desk. That was odd, Winry thought as she rose and pushed her goggles up. Most patients saved their questions for their appointments.

Leaning an elbow on the counter above the reception desk, Winry held the phone to her ear. "This is Winry," she said.

"Hey, Pidg."

Winry straightened up suddenly and glanced around. "Jean," she hissed into the receiver. "I asked you not to call me on this line. What are you doing?"

"Courtin' you," he replied lazily. She could just hear him slouching back in his office chair and staring at the ceiling. "What are _you_ doing?"

Winry hunkered down where the patients in the waiting room couldn't see her and ignored the looks the secretary was giving her. "I'll give you a hint," she whispered, "It starts with a _w_ and ends with an _orking_."

"Weird. Me, too." He chuckled into the phone. "When are you done?"

The receptionist had told Winry that she had one patient that afternoon. "I don't know. Three maybe?" She glanced over her shoulder, just knowing her supervisor was going to wander up and overhear.

"I've got a meeting with Facilities Management 'til five, but if you want, you can go over to my place and start dinner," he suggested. Winry heard a shift in his voice and could just tell he was grinning. "You know, it would be real nice to come home to a lasagna waiting for me."

She cupped her hand around the mouthpiece. "What do I look like? Your wifey?" Winry snapped as quietly as she could.

"I'm amenable."

She almost dropped the phone. Perhaps that's what electrocution feels like: having her boyfriend of only a month or so drop a deceptively casual bomb like that on her. Winry felt the sparrow in her chest fluttering cramped circles around her ribcage. When all the other things she could say got too tangled up, she squeaked, "Did you remember your uniform?"

"I did, actually," he went on, with the easy confidence Winry had come to expect from him now. Before the last meeting Jean had had with the Director of Facilities Management, he had left his uniform, clean and pressed, in his closet. He had told her about it that evening, about how refreshingly low everyone's expectations had been of him while he was covered in grease and smelled like acetylene.

Winry heard the baritone of her supervisor coming down the hall toward her, and she hunkered down further. "Listen, Jean, I have to go. Did you need something?"

There was a long pause on the other end of the line. "No?"

Winry rolled her eyes. "Then why did you call?"

"I don't know," he said, some exaggerated hurt in his voice, "Maybe I knew I wasn't going to see you until late, and I wanted to hear your voice before I waded into that shark tank of a conference room for the next four hours."

Despite herself, Winry smiled, and when she tried to sound irritated into the phone, she knew—and she was pretty sure Jean knew—that she was faking. "You'll be okay. I've got to run, but I'll see you tonight?"

They exchanged quick, quiet goodbyes, and Winry hung up the phone. She felt her heart dancing, her face warming, and it felt like something downy was expanding in her chest so fast. She smiled at the phone and was feeling too flustered to really defend herself when the receptionist teased her. All Winry could muster was a dismissive wave as she turned and headed back toward her workshop.

When her last afternoon appointment arrived, the receptionist came and knocked, once more, on Winry's door. The patient had been shown into one of the examination rooms and was waiting for her there. Cracking her neck and popping her knuckles, Winry headed off to see him.

His records were in a plastic file-holder on the wall by the door, and Winry plucked them out and flipped back the cover as she opened the door to the examination room.

Her eyes landed on the name at the top of the page just before the file slipped from her hands and fluttered to the floor. She froze in the doorway. She stared.

"Edward?"

He sat on the examination table, his shoulders rolled, his elbows on his knees, his pale, drawn face smiling a smile that didn't reach his eyes; his hair was so long now, tied back and hanging in a tail down his spine, but his face was like a photograph, one taken from far away, where the impression of him was definitely intact, but he was weary-looking and travel-worn and there—so it couldn't possibly be him, right?—and his clothes seemed too loose for him and perhaps a little shabby but that didn't matter because _he was back he was back he was back._

Winry strode over Edward's file, spilled across the floor, and wrapped her arms around his shoulders.

This was, she realized as his arms crept up her sides and settled against her ribs, what she always wanted to do, what she never allowed herself to do when she greeted him. Were it not for the shock—and for the company—Winry would have done this at the Armstrong Gala, and then perhaps Edward would have still haunted her mind that night, but it would have been in a completely different way. He smelled like soap and road dust.

There were stored up rages she knew she had for him, but she couldn't find them.

"Would it kill you to call once in a while?" Winry asked into his neck, her tears rolling down her face to blot into the fabric of his shirt.

"Didn't think you'd want to hear from me," Edward said through a dry, self-deprecating sort of laugh.

"You know, I didn't until just now."

He pulled back and looked at her, and Winry knew that face. That was the face that Edward put on when she was being cruel but when he knew he deserved it. She watched that face, stood between his knees, rested her hands on his thighs. And she was so, so grateful.

Where this new woman had come from, Winry wasn't entirely sure. She hadn't been aware of it until just then, until a younger her wouldn't have known what to do with all this damn _love_ she had for him and would have, instead, hit him or yelled at him. But now, all _everything_ aside, Winry just wanted to touch him, make certain he was there, alive, with her.

The feeling was overwhelming, a tangle of things rapidly expanding in her chest, pressing up into her throat, filling her mouth with angers and hurts and loves and loves and loves.

Winry set her hand on Edward's hollow cheek and kissed the corner of his mouth.

"How you been?" she asked, smiling at him, right at him.

His automail hand was jerky and weak when he set it over hers. He seemed almost uncertain, and Winry could not deny the satisfaction she got from being the resolute one. _Finally._

"I've been better," he said, his voice papery.

This is what it felt like to properly welcome him, she thought. She could show him the life she'd had since he'd been gone, a life she enjoyed, one she found almost as fulfilling as the one she had imagined she would have with him. _See_, she could say, _my world turns without you now._ And then she could be the generous woman she always wished she was and pause that rotation—not turn it back, mind you, just make it hesitate a little—just long enough to show Edward how amazing it was. How amazing shewas, the steady compass, always pointing north toward the seat of her borderless world of clemency.

Winry smiled. And she understood. She wasn't afraid to be compassionate anymore.

"Maybe if you didn't go a year between tune-ups, Ed," Winry told him, taking his automail hand in both of hers and turning it carefully, slowly.

Ed laughed a little guiltily. "Sorry about that."

Winry met his eyes and wondered how much he was apologizing for with that.

But it didn't matter because she knew how much she was forgiving when she said, "It's okay."

x

x

x

The big clock on the wall in the vestibule of Jean's apartment building read six-thirty when she came in the front door, panting and flustered. Winry barely had time to glance at it as she hurried down the hall, her shoes _tap-tap-tapping _on the green and white tiles. When she had left her workshop, the other engineers were already gone, and the receptionist had left. At around six or so, Winry thought she heard the phone ringing unanswered outside her workshop, but she had ignored it. She had a feeling it was Jean, and now she felt compelled to generate excuses. Because telling him that she had stayed late to finish up Ed's arm—which was the simple, platonic truth—felt like something he wouldn't want to hear.

But why, Winry asked herself, knowing good and well why. It was nothing. She did a favor for an old, old friend, the oldest she had. She had had to replace all the ball bearing in his shoulder, had to adjust the suspension in his elbow, had to replace the entire nervous impulse converter. It was a big job. But it was _nothing_.

She was running up the concrete steps in the stairwell, her steps echoing hollowly from floor to roof.

Jean wouldn't think anything of it, she assured herself. He wouldn't mind. He'd have no reason to mind.

Winry didn't knock when she got to the door of his apartment. She made no attempt to slip in unnoticed when she dropped her purse on the table by the door, next to Jean's keys and wallet. A floor lamp was on by the window, and the hanging lamp in the kitchen was on, where Jean was setting dishes in the sink.

"Hey, Pidg," he said, smiling despite the gravity in his voice.

Winry hurried over and stopped him from asking what took her, from telling her he had called the office and no one picked up, from saying he was getting kind of worried. Jean hardily had to time to turn the faucet off before Winry seized the front of his shirt, damp with sweat from the summery heat in his flat, and kissed him fiercely.

She felt him submit, and that, more than the soft, pliancy of his mouth, more than his big, angular hands on her sides, more than his fast breath across her cheek, felt so nice. Winry tugged him closer to her, wrapped her arm around his neck. She pulled them both toward the counter until she felt her lower back bump the edge.

Her intentions must have been clear then because Jean pulled her right knee around his hip and pushed her back and up onto the counter. Still pressed close, still kissing frantically, Winry managed to wriggle out of her shorts before plucking blindly, frenziedly at Jean's belt. He dropped one of his hands from her sides and helped her.

Winry felt his teeth on her neck, his nose pressing into her skin, and she curled her hand severely in Jean's hair when he pressed into her. They made complementary sounds, Jean's low and guttural, and Winry's a whimper.

Winry allowed herself to be inundated then. The smell of Jean's hair and skin, of his apartment. The sound of her name in his voice—he always called her Winry during sex like it was a secret between them. The pinch and stretch of her muscles and skin sighing, and Winry knew abstractly and appreciated viscerally that he was probably the biggest she could handle.

They both had one hand set against the countertop, and Winry came hard when she felt Jean's hand inch across the counter and settle on hers, his fingers curling around her knuckles. She bucked and clawed his back, her eyes squeezed shut, crying over and over _Jean Jean Jean_.

He usually gave her a moment to catch her breath and soothe her shuddering nerves unless he was quite close to finishing himself, and when he did not pause, when he leaned her back, when he quickened his pace until it almost started to hurt, Winry allowed herself to slip back and sort of float away on the comfort of familiarity. She'd heard women talk of the allure of unpredictability, of new lovers with their new habits, but Winry thought there was nothing more wonderful than this safety, than Jean and his apartment and the sounds he made when he came in her.

Winry sagged backward and propped her elbows against the bar that separated the kitchen from the dining area. She breathed hard, felt Jean breathing hard, and as pleasant as his weight felt against her, his apartment was too damn hot. She rested a hand on his shoulder and gently pushed him back.

"Hi," she said when she met his eyes.

Jean grinned. "Hi," he managed. "It is _awfully_ good to see you."

Winry looked away, a little embarrassed by her own enthusiasm. She heard him laugh and felt him snake an arm around her back and pull her up. They sat then, almost nose to nose. Winry appreciated the quiet in her mind now, the simplicity and the stillness. Jean kissed her quietly, told her that he made her something to eat if she were hungry, handed her her underwear from off the floor.

She heard him laughing at her when she hurried off to the bathroom to get cleaned up. She looked at herself in the mirror over the sink then and listened to Jean heating up her dinner for her in the kitchen. She laughed a self-deprecating sort of laugh. Looked at herself incredulously. How could she ever imagine there was a life more fulfilling than this one?


End file.
